Demon's Souls E3 Previews
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We start at GameSpot:
The kingdom of Boletaria is swarming with demons of all shapes and sizes--thanks to a power-hungry king--so you'll be traveling through the foggy wastelands and exploring dingy dungeons trying to collect as many souls as you can. It's not like a traditional massively multiplayer online game in which there are hundreds and thousands of players around you at all times. While you're always going to be online when playing Demon's Souls, the ghosts that you see when you stumble upon a bloodstain are death animations of players who have died at that very spot. Players can leave helpful or foreboding messages behind for others, warning them of the dangers ahead or directing them to secrets that might be easily missed. We were told that there will be competitive player-versus-player for up to four later in the game, and you can also play cooperatively in groups of three to do boss runs.
And then move to Kotaku, where the focus in on the game's "death innovation":
Demon's Soul pulls snippets of real players' actions in the game. It then randomly replicates snippets of other players' actions, rendering them as the actions of ghosts in the levels that you would be playing through. Players can also manually leave messages for others to discover (all based on a canned phrase-list, so you can't write anything you want). They can also offer to help other players and be invited in for brief co-op action. But the ghost appearances are the most clever touch.
The most interesting application of the ghost mechanic may be how it handles player death. Throughout the darkened caverns of the level I was shown that there were bloodstains on the floor. Some were at the edge of a chasm. Others were in the middle of an area where open combat was waged. The bloodstains represented the deaths of other players. Stepping on the stains and pressing a button activated a ghost rendering of some other player's final moments in the game before getting their character killed. Stepping on it would reveal how they met their fate.
